+++
title = "Weekly Research"
date = 2021-10-24
+++


Terminals follow-up turned into a look at WMs and Wayland
=========================================================

While reading about terminals, I came across a thread from a few years
ago where someone suggested their terminal supported the following
command, but others did not. Unfortunately, I cannot find the link
anymore.

```
# This will break most shells or terminals
echo -e "\033(0"

```

So I tried that terminal and it still broke. It broke in everything I
tried. Moving on for now...

Along the way I tried several DEs and WMs I had not used in a while.
Xfce has been my daily driver for the last two or three years. I mainly
tried out IceWM and LXDE which I had previously used as my daily driver
before Xfce.

IceWM
-----

I spent quite a bit of time using IceWM. I mostly used the win95 theme.
It reminded me of when I used Tails in the office because at the time
some folks gave me flack for using \"Linucks\". That slowly stopped. And
now I pretty much haven\'t used Tails since before the pandemic now.

I have pasted the output below, with a minor edit to the desktop
background image path. Some of these combine things I pasted from a
couple sources from the faq or forums. Note that every time I switched
it mutated the theme dotfile, so I left it for posterity. My lockscreen
did not work, but not a big deal when I have a door on my office. Not
sure if another WM/DE config had clobbered it. I did notice some changes
to xscreensaver.

```
~ $ tree .icewm/
.icewm/
├── preferences
├── startup
└── theme

0 directories, 3 files
~ $ cat .icewm/startup 
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
set -u
set -o pipefail


xcompmgr -c &
~ $ cat .icewm/theme 
Theme="win95/default.theme"
#Theme="default/default.theme"
#Theme="win95/default.theme"
#Theme="default/default.theme"
#Theme="win95/default.theme"
~ $ cat .icewm/preferences 
# Display desktop background centered and not tiled
DesktopBackgroundCenter=1 # 0/1

# Support for semitransparent terminals like Eterm or gnome-terminal
# SupportSemitransparency=1 # 0/1

# Desktop background scaled to full screen
DesktopBackgroundScaled=1 # 0/1

# Desktop background color
DesktopBackgroundColor="rgb:00/00/00"

# Desktop background image
DesktopBackgroundImage="/home/USERNAME/wallpapers/foo.jpg"

```

Wayland
-------

I decided to look into DEs or WMs with Wayland support. Though I
currently use Debian buster, I often take a look at other distros such
as gnu guix system (formerly aka just guix aka guixsd) or arch just to
see what they\'ve packaged. I went down some more rabbit holes. I found
this fun command to print out whether I had x11 or wayland.

```
loginctl \
    show-session \
    $(loginctl | grep $(whoami) | awk '{print $1}') \
    -p Type

```

hikari
------

I haven\'t spent much time with hikari yet. But I did watch their video
on why they chose darcs which seems like one of the best explanations
I\'ve heard for the whole \"why not use git?\" question.

That said, I want a compositing WM because I already do tiling inside
emacs anyway. That said... sounds like an interesting massive spin-off
project to write an elisp-extensible WM with emacs compatibility. Not
that I have the time for that since I barely have time for my blog.

Folks who want to use Windows
=============================

Two well-seasoned staffers I work with asked for help this week. They do
not feel comfortable using anything but Windows, but want to develop
some CLI apps in Windows for use on bash.

A side note: Personally, I feel like if someone can survive the
migration over the last decade from XP to Vista to 7 to 10, migrating to
a Gnome or KDE or UbuntuDE shouldn\'t cause any more confusion. Though I
didn\'t come here today to complain, so back to business.

I gave them several suggestions:

-   Use cygwin. It has some unique UI steps, but it feels like a Windows
    app.
-   The Debian WSL feels like a tty to a remote running Debian.
-   Windows Terminal might work, but I\'ve never used it.
-   Alacritty can work on any system. So if they ever decide to not use
    Windows they could just migrate their dotfiles (if they do that).
-   Chocolatey might be a good idea if they want a package manager.

See also
========

-   <https://hikari.acmelabs.space/videos/hikari-darcs.mp4>
-   <https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3075>
-   <https://chocolatey.org/>

Reading
=======

-   <https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/03/16/DrCalvin.html>
-   <https://medium.com/@amannagpal4/how-to-create-your-own-decentralized-file-sharing-service-using-python-2e00005bdc4a>
-   <https://github.com/golgote/neturl>
-   <https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html>
